'Vietnam' Critique Is In Public Interest

It wouldn't be accurate to say that PBS presently is a house divided against itself. PBS is more like a loose-knit motel chain -- TV's Quality Courts -- than a house.

But there is indeed division within the far-flung, multilayered system over the PBS news department's willingness to give an hour to an avowedly political organization -- Accuracy in Media (AIM) -- to ''correct'' a 1983 documentary series, Vietnam: A Television History, that won a Peabody Award, a DuPont-Columbia University journalism prize and six Emmys.

At Boston public-TV station WGBH, which produced the series, there is suspicion that PBS is bending to conservative political pressures not unlike those exerted by the Nixon administration in the early 1970s. Feeding this suspicion is the atypical swiftness with which the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which administers PBS' federal funds, and the National Endowment for the Humanities came forth with $100,000 to fund AIM's project.

Barry Chase, PBS' vice president for news, insists that PBS is not disavowing the Vietnam series (''one of our finest hours'') by showing AIM's film. He sees it as a responsible display of openness and accessibility.

Chase is right. What PBS has done with the AIM film is not a sellout. By presenting AIM's hourlong critique within the context of a two-hour special edition of the media-analysis series Inside Story (tonight, 8-10, WMFE-Channel 24), PBS has further illuminated not just the war in Vietnam, but also some of the fundamental points that put organizations like AIM at odds with journalism.

Harvard law professor Arthur Miller anchors the program, which begins with a rundown of how WGBH's six-year, $5.5 million Vietnam project was conceived, who put it together and how it was received. There is a parallel profile of AIM and its driving force, Reed Irvine.

AIM's Television's Vietnam: The Real Story, shown in its entirety, takes up almost an hour. After it comes a section in which Inside Story's producers run AIM's criticisms by a variety of Vietnam experts. The show closes with Miller moderating a discussion among Irvine, PBS' Chase, former CBS News president Richard Salant, Vietnam series head researcher Lawrence Lichty and others.

The AIM film is journalism for people who hate biased Dan Rather and love objective Paul Harvey. Dramatically narrated by Charlton Heston, the film goes after viewers' emotions with sentimental music and poetry played off against scenes of communist brutality. Irvine later defends this -- and in the process shows an idealogue's impatience with journalism -- by saying that considering what has happened in Vietnam, PBS' attempts at balance and objectivity were ''obscene.''

Inside Story's examination of the film turns up instances of misinformation and fact-twisting on AIM's part. But it also finds some substance to AIM's complaints about, among other things, the series' slighting of the South Vietnamese's contribution to the war effort.

What this and other examples confirm, however, are not the conspiracy AIM repeatly hints at but, rather, the impossibility of definitive history. No one TV series, no more than one book, can tell the ''whole'' story of Vietnam or any other subject so broad and complex. Perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from tonight's program is that television networks best serve the public when they create a dialogue, not when they attempt to have the last word.